


Revenge, or -

by Desdemon



Category: Miss Bala (2019)
Genre: Consent Issues, Everybody Lives, F/M, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desdemon/pseuds/Desdemon
Summary: Lino is out. Lino has escaped from prison. The CIA got a photo of him and Poyo shortly before they made it across the border. That was thirty-six hours ago, and agents are still trying to get a fix on their current location.
Relationships: Gloria Fuentes/Lino Esparza
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Revenge, or -

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hecate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/gifts).



The phone slips out of Gloria’s nerveless fingers. Jimmy’s voice is still coming through the speaker, tinny and unimportant: _”Gloria? Gloria, are you there?”_

Lino is out. Lino has escaped from prison. The CIA got a photo of him and Poyo shortly before they made it across the border. That was thirty-six hours ago, and agents are still trying to get a fix on their current location.

Gloria inhales, sudden and painful, her burning lungs informing her that this is the first time she’s breathed since she heard those words. Her eyes dart to the door, then the windows, and then before she knows it she’s doing a sweep of the entire apartment, methodical and paranoid, the way the CIA taught her. She only remembers the phone when she’s completed the entire circuit back to where she was standing by the bed and finds it dark on the coverlet. When she picks it up, Jimmy has texted, _Call me in 10 so I know you’re good._

There’s no one in the apartment. Of course there’s no one in the apartment. Gloria just arrived here yesterday, and this location was completely vetted before she got here, and also, she’s in El Paso, and Lino would have to be a really stupid son of a bitch to travel all the way to El Paso just for revenge.

Revenge, or - 

Gloria swallows, breathes steadily through her nose a few times to steady herself, and calls Jimmy back to let him know she’s good.

\--

The last time she saw Lino was just a glimpse of his snarling face, his body almost totally obscured by the swarm of CIA agents bundling him into the back of an unmarked van.

That was the last time, the real last time. What _feels_ like the last time was five minutes before that, before the helmeted figures in black riot gear burst in through the motel room door, but after both Lino and Gloria heard them arrive.

They’d stared at each other, listening to the drag of the van’s engine as it pulled up outside, the muted shuffle of feet, the creak of body armor just outside the door. Their faces were so close she could feel the warm puff of his breath on her skin. Lino’s clear eyes were wide, never moving from hers. At the time, she thought she was watching surprise and betrayal dawn in those eyes.

Looking back, now she thinks it was something more like awe.

\--

The drop is happening tomorrow, at a bar. Gloria’s the new bartender, just picking up a few days of work while beauty school is on break. They like to give her identities with life stories close enough to her own that she doesn’t have to do much lying if she gets caught - it’s safer that way, at least until she gets better at lying.

She’s getting better all the time.

Her first shift starts off well. She’s naturally good at this part, projecting nonthreatening friendliness, just happy to help, smiling big and ducking her head shyly when people in positions of authority over her smile back. Her accent is getting better lately, too, which is why Jimmy has started giving her more jobs near the border. It feels good to speak Spanish and not have the person she’s talking to visibly readjust their expectations.

By one a.m., she’s in the swing of things, cleaning glasses and laughing comfortably at some dumb story a customer is telling her over his Lone Star, when a drunken swell of cheering from the corner with the dartboard attracts her attention and she sees the back of a head, tight close-cut curls, elegant neck, and she is suddenly frozen with certainty.

She continues to laugh at the customer’s story. She continues to clean the glass. She knows the quickest way out, and she doesn’t see any of his guys in here - at least not inside. She’s got a gun in her leather jacket where it’s hanging in the break room. She knows at least three routes back to the apartment and she can run there on foot if she has to.

The man by the dartboard laughs, a little too far away for her to make out his voice. She watches the movement ripple his lean, muscled frame, and then someone calls to him, and he starts to turn his head.

Gloria flinches so hard she drops the glass. It shatters on the bar in front of her and she has to leap back to avoid the bouncing shards. There are calls of “Nice” and “Buen trabajo”.

He is in full profile to her now. It’s not him. This guy has a beaky nose and dark eyes. It’s a totally different guy.

Someone rings the bell they ring when someone breaks a glass and she smiles and shrugs performatively at the crowd, accepting her fuckup with good grace, wrinkling her nose in cute embarrassment. 

Jesus Christ. She has to get her shit together.

\--

The CIA were on their way from the moment she and Lino had set foot in the motel parking lot. On the way out of the car, she had crushed the tiny beige tracker stuck to the skin of her wrist, peeling it off with a fingernail and letting it drop to the ground, just a little scrap of trash on the asphalt. That was the signal, when the tracker went dead.

“If it goes dead because Lino found it, then we need to get the fuck in there and grab you either way,” Jimmy had explained, putting to rest her deepest fear before she’d figured out how to put the question into words. The relief had been so intense her eyes had prickled, but she’d blinked it away and nodded firmly at him. Jimmy probably knew all the details of her experience with the DEA, but it had still been good to hear that she wouldn’t be abandoned.

Her job had been simple, in the end. Distract him. Keep him talking. We’ll pick him up, and we’ll get you out. She’d won some trust during the Miss Baja California thing, so she was their best bet to separate Lino from his crew and keep him in one location for the pickup.

Lino wasn’t the king of his world for no reason, however. He was still Lino: suspicious, insecure, angry in advance about imagined betrayals. He’d brought Poyo with them, stationing him one room over, eyes cool on Gloria as he instructed him to come interrupt them for any reason, at the slightest noise.

This had been meant to scare her, to make her doubt her place in Lino’s group, to cow her into behaving. And maybe before the Miss Baja California thing, she might have reacted that way. She might have subsided, anxious, waiting for the next time that Lino seemed relaxed to try anything.

But Gloria didn’t scare so easily anymore. And Lino didn’t threaten her directly unless he was worried.

And she’d thought - correctly, as it turned out - that he was more worried about himself than about her.

\--  
Gloria finishes out the shift, pretending great interest in the manager’s rundown on how to close the bar, knowing that she won’t be here tomorrow morning to do any of this a second time. Then she’s in a cab, texting Jimmy a brief description of her evening, sans crazy freakout, and then she’s back at the apartment, doing another sweep to confirm that everything is the way she’d left it.

Everything is quiet, and untouched. Birds are waking up outside. It’s one of Gloria’s least favorite sounds, frankly, an aggressive reminder that she should have been in bed hours ago. But she’s still wired, and not because of her bartender schedule.

Lino isn’t coming to find her. She tells herself this firmly as she goes through the motions of getting ready for bed. Even if she were his first priority, fresh out of prison - and how self-absorbed is she, to think that she might be? - even then, the CIA would be on top of it. The CIA warned her in the first place. They’re actively looking for Lino. They’re probably more concerned about the possibility of him visiting her than she is.

Probably.

She’s thought about it, of course, even when Lino was safely locked up, with the possibility of parole several years down the line. What she’d do if he found her. She’s gotten so good at identifying the exits of every building she’s in. A few months ago, she took up running, and last month she introduced sprints to increase her average speed. It makes her feel good to be fast, better even than her improving marksmanship, better than any of her CIA training.

In bed, eyes closed, birds cruelly reminding her of the hour, Gloria doesn’t really sleep. Instead, she slips into a half-drifting state and dreams, running from loud cars behind the windshields of which she cannot see the drivers. She sees Lino again. His eyes are warm, and he isn’t angry with her.

Her tinkling alarm jolts her out of a state of guilty relief, and she panics before she can place the sound, the location, the day, the reason. When it all falls into place she just lies still for a moment, recalibrating, finding her anger again. She doesn’t give a shit what Lino thinks of her. She doesn’t owe him anything, and he could never repay what he owes her, even if he wanted to.

The steel of this thought gets her up, and lets her get ready for the day. The drop is tonight, and Gloria is ready. 

\-- 

Lino had showered first, at the the motel, and it had been almost too easy to take the handcuffs out of her inside jacket pocket and hide them in the drawer of the desk before the water shut off. When he’d come out in only a towel, beads of water skimming down his toned body, she’d just turned to her bag to grab a change of clothes, denying him the reaction she knew he wanted.

“Any hot water left?” she’d asked tersely.

His rich rumble of laughter was answer enough. “Plenty, chola,” he added, in that low, rasping tone that said he’d remembered today that he wanted to seduce her.

“Great,” she’d said, and locked the bathroom door behind her.

When she came out, clean and changed into the button-up and sweats she’d brought as pajamas, he had turned the desk chair around and was sitting in it, toweling off his hair in a sleeveless tee and shorts.

“Come here,” he’d said. She’d obeyed, walking slowly to him until she was standing in between his legs, forcing him to crane his head up to look at her.

“What’s wrong, chola? Are you mad at me?” he’d asked her in a soft, mocking voice, staring up at her with those clear eyes.

“Why’d you bring Poyo here?” she asked unhesitatingly. He must have picked up on some of her tension and anxiety, and she had to give him a good reason why her energy was off. “You still don’t trust me?” she asked, a little quieter. She moved another millimeter or two into his space.

He swayed back, eyes locked on her. “Poyo goes where I go,” he said, but then he relented and changed his answer. “I don’t trust anybody, Gloria. You know that.”

“What do I have to do?” Gloria asked, feeling a little rush of adrenaline as she said the words. She knew what she was aiming at, and so did Lino, because his eyes dilated right away, and he let the towel fall from his fingers to the floor. “What will it take to make you trust me, Lino?”

She moved before she could rethink the decision, climbing into Lino’s lap. His hands rose to support her, moving from her hips up her bare sides underneath the button-up. She shuddered and her heartrate picked up so fast she felt dizzy.

“This is a good start,” Lino murmured, his lazy tone belied by the intensity of his stare, by the ripple of his stomach muscles underneath her.

She sucked in a deep breath and fumbled under the hem of her shirt for his hands, found them, and firmly pulled them away from her. She leaned forward, pressing herself against Lino’s chest, adrenaline spiking sharp and hot at his intake of breath, and pushed his arms back, behind the chair, wrists together.

She was sure he wouldn’t allow it, but he just laughed, a breathless gust in her ear. “Kinky, chola,” he whispered.

Pressing her cheek against his, she whispered back, “Shut up, Lino.”

His rumbling laugh was enough of a distraction for her to use one hand to crack the desk drawer open behind him while the other hand encircled his wrists tightly. She pulled her head back enough to look him in the eyes, and almost lost her nerve - he looked so soft, somehow, so young, so unlike the criminal and the killer she knew him to be. But then he smirked at her, and it all rushed back, the bomb, Suzu, _Isabel_ \- 

Gloria leaned in and kissed him. Lino’s lips were soft, and when he parted them for her so sweetly, a little sound in the back of his throat, his tongue was soft, too. She held onto his wrists, feeling his shoulders flex as he fought the urge to touch her, his whole body tightening as he surged up into her kiss.

The click of the first handcuff made them both open their eyes. Lino had not quite gotten his brain back online by the time the second clicked shut.

Gloria pulled away, just enough for the expression on Lino’s face to come into focus.

And that was when they heard the van pull up.

\--

One-thirty rolls around, twenty minutes until the drop, and Gloria still hasn’t seen her contact. That’s not so unusual that she’s concerned just yet. Give it ten minutes, and then she might need to reach out and see what’s going on.

In the meantime, she’s using most of her energy to keep up her easygoing bartender-beauty-student role, having resigned herself to the fact that she’s just going to feel off for this entire job. She’s probably going to feel off until Jimmy tells her they’ve caught Lino and he’s behind bars again, and then she’s probably going to wait for a call saying he’s broken out again for a few more months.

After that, she’ll probably be fine.

The good-natured teasing from the regulars about the glass she broke yesterday helps ground her in the moment. There are a lot of last night’s patrons here, actually, probably a full third of the bar. That makes it easier to scan for her contact, and eases some of her anxiety about somehow being surprised by an escaped convict while she’s working.

After ten minutes, she asks her boss for a smoke break, like she’s supposed to, and swings on her leather jacket on her way out the door. It’s a little quieter behind the building, an alleyway made up of parking spaces for the various late-night businesses and their employees, and she exhales into the slightly chilly night air.

She is looking at her phone, wondering if now is the time to text Jimmy, when she hears his voice.

“Hey.”

Gloria looks up, feeling strangely neutral, neither dreading nor anticipating who she will see. “Hi, Lino,” she says softly.

His hair is buzzed short, and he has quite the shiner on one cheekbone. Otherwise, he looks exactly the same.

\--

When the CIA rushed in, grabbed Lino and carried him bodily away, Gloria had been too freaked out to register what she was feeling one way or the other. All she knew was that her adrenaline was high and the blood was roaring in her ears and she was finally free, one hundred percent free, of Lino. It was hours later, after the ride to the safe house, after the debrief, after Gloria was safe behind the locked door of her private suite, that she started to come down. She was in the bathroom, idly thinking about maybe taking another shower, when her body sort of crumpled and she found herself on her hands and knees, gasping thinly.

In the toxic cocktail of emotions that left her shaking on the tiled floor, it wasn’t the most important feeling she was having. It wasn’t even the strongest; the dominant feeling in her body was a kind of delayed dread, an acute fear of things that could no longer happen to her, because everything was finally over.

It wasn’t the most important feeling. But unlike the rest of it, which faded with time and therapy and self-care techniques like learning her comprehensive way around a gun, it lingered. It was small, and stupid, but it lingered. Maybe it lingered _because_ it was small and stupid.

Kissing Lino hadn’t just felt good as a means to an end, as a goal almost accomplished. Kissing Lino had felt good, period.

After everything Gloria had been through, that was somehow the hardest thing to live with.

\--

“How you been?” Lino says, ducking his head like he’s nervous, one hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck.

Gloria’s still got her phone in her hand. Her gun rests against her side, a comfortable weight inside her jacket. If she needs to run, she’s fairly confident that Lino couldn’t catch her.

He’s looking at her now, head cocked as he rubs his neck, clear eyes as confident, and as vulnerable, as they always have been. She’s pretty sure he has something to do with why her contact hasn’t shown up yet.

Gloria takes a deep breath, and she puts her phone in her pocket.

“I’ve been good, Lino,” she says. “You?”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, Hecate! I hope you enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.


End file.
